Opinion: Failure of Neal Stephenson Kickstarter Is Apparently Everyone’s Fault But the Developer’s

Subutai Corporation, the developer of the game, has said in an update to Kickstarter backers that it has “hit the pause button” on the game’s development “while we get the financing situation sorted out.”

In other words, it has burned through the over half a million dollars that backers donated to get Clang made, and can’t finish the game without more money.

Hey, I get it, this kind of thing is going to happen. Projects often end up over budget, and as a Kickstarter backer, one has to be wary of to whom one donates money. Does the project’s scope seem to match the amount they’re asking for? Do they have a good track record? It’s the same sort of due diligence that a typical investor in the gaming space would do. Don’t spend any money on Kickstarter that you aren’t comfortable with losing.

But what shocks me about this particular update is that Subutai seems to be neither apologetic, nor realistic about what actually occurred in this case. Reading the update, it seems like the blame is falling everywhere but on Subutai’s own decisions.

We’ve hit the pause button on further CLANG development while we get the financing situation sorted out.

Just here in this first line, for example. “The financing situation” is not some external thing that happened to Subutai; it asked for too little money and/or spent it too fast.

We stretched the Kickstarter money farther than we had expected to

These must have been a revised set of expectations, as I don’t see anything in the original Kickstarter pitch that reads “We do not expect that this will be enough money to make this game.”

(Update: As Simon Carless points out on Twitter, buried in the Kickstarter pitch is the line, “The next step is to build a functional proof of concept in the form of an exciting prototype we can share with you and use to achieve our next level of funding,” which is, in fact, a day one indication that Subutai was going to seek more money later.)

In the meantime, if you’re still interested in helping the next generation of swordfighting games move forward, have a look at the STEM Kickstarter now being run by our friends at Sixense.

“Please throw good money after bad.”

Loyal donors may be curious as to why an apparently promising game is difficult to finance.

Especially since it was already financed.

The answer has a lot to do with the current state of the video game industry. While we have been working on CLANG, two major video game publishers, THQ and LucasArts, have gone out of business. Others have fallen on hard times. The current generation of consoles is coming to the end of its life cycle. Rather than invest in innovative new titles, the still-surviving publishers tend to keep their heads down, grinding out sequels and extensions to well-worn AAA franchises.

Which is why game developers are turning to Kickstarter, to raise the money that traditional publishers won’t risk.

As some of you have quite reasonably pointed out, we have gone a long time without updates. This doesn’t reflect our ideal of how to go about communicating with our donors. It is a consequence of the very nature of fundraising. Even in favorable circumstances, the search for funding can last a staggeringly long period of time. At any given point in the fundraising process, one or more conversations is underway with possible funders; each of these conversations tends to spread out over a span of months and to turn into its own separate drama complete with moments of hope and reversals of fortune. The dreaded term “next week” makes frequent appearances in emails. All of those interactions are, of course, confidential. Sending out a vague update about inconclusive, ongoing conversations with potential investors doesn’t seem nearly as attractive as waiting a couple more weeks for a deal to actually come through, and then making a triumphant announcement of that.

Nobody was looking for updates on Subutai’s search for more money, they were looking for updates on the ongoing development of the game.

Is the CLANG project dead? At what point do you put a toe tag on an indie game and call it finished? Opinions on that might vary, but in our opinion, the project doesn’t die simply because it runs out of money. Projects run out of money all the time. As a matter of fact, game industry veterans we have talked to take a blithe attitude toward running out of money, and seem to consider it an almost obligatory rite of passage.

So, you know, it’s no big deal, really. It’s “almost obligatory.” It would have been weirder had we not run out of money, you know. This is an indication that we’re doing something right.

Paradoxically, we feel better about the future of CLANG now than we did when the clock was ticking down.

It’s not as paradoxical as you’d think; you feel better about it because you have removed from yourselves any obligation to actually create it.

Oh, and it just gets worse from here, starting… now.

LESSONS LEARNED

–Kickstarter lock-in. Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people’s money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime.

Hidden. Catches. That’s right. Kickstarter totally bamboozled and hornswaggled Subutai on this. Only after completing the whole Kickstarter did they discover the hidden trick to the whole thing, which is that you have to make the thing you took people’s money to make. This was totally not obvious beforehand, as evidenced by Kickstarter’s motto: “Kickstarter: A Free Money Tree With No Obligations.” Turns out that’s a big ol’ lie.

In our case, what it meant was that in April of 2013 we were still executing on a strategy that we had come up with at the beginning of 2012. A conventionally funded company would have changed course several times during such a long span of time, adapting its strategy to what was happening in the market.

Nothing fundamentally changed about the videogame market between April 2012 and April 2013. Moreover, had Clang been funded by a traditional publisher, Subutai would still be obligated to deliver a game to that publisher.

The potential financiers most likely to talk to us are Neal Stephenson fans. Once they have actually met Neal and gotten their books signed, it turns out that they are not really that interested in our project. But they don’t want to make Neal Stephenson feel bad and so they don’t give him any useful feedback; instead they just go dark. In the meantime we have wasted a huge amount of time on them. We were slow to cotton on to this.

The project was supposed to have had all the money it needed already.

We frequently encounter a sort of wall of incredulity that Stephenson could really be having trouble obtaining funding for a swordfighting game project.

Usually followed by the question, “What did you do with the half a mil that people already gave you?”

–the prototype/demo is underwhelming in its current state. We always knew that this would be the case, but there is little to be done about it since we are trying to build a new game play mechanic from scratch, not just re-skin a familiar mechanic. In other words, this is not a failure of execution [on] our part, but some might consider it a tactical mistake, arguing that we should have put more into gameplay and less into fundamentals. We’re comfortable with the direction we went, since without fundamentals we don’t really have anything new to offer.

This is the closest Subutai gets to admitting that it shot for the moon and didn’t have the ability to execute on its promises, but note that it only says that “some might consider it a mistake” and that Subutai does not.

Let’s wrap this up. How exactly does Subutai plan, now that the project is circling the drain, to save it?

We doubt it is productive to subject CLANG to comparison shopping before the jaded eyes of generic VCs. Our approach needs to be more selective. But it is almost impossible for a small group, focused on making a game, to obtain the sort of Olympian perspective on the game funding landscape that is needed to identify the right sorts of investors quickly enough to be of any use. Our only efficient choice is to keep doing what we’re doing and wait for the right investor to come along.

We’re not going to actually go out and pound the pavement and look for investors. We are going to sit around and wait for the right investor to come and find us. Amazing.

What can people do to help? Probably not that much

No kidding.

If you are one of our Kickstarter donors, then probably the most helpful thing you can do, as far as the CLANG team is concerned, is to be patient. We always knew that this was going to take a while and that we’d hit some bumps along the way.

If they “always knew” that this was going to take a long time, why was the Kickstarter delivery date for the finished game set at February 2013?

Hey, Kickstarter creators: If you run out of money and need to explain things to your backers, you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place and I don’t envy you having to decide how to approach it. But I can say one thing: Definitely do not post an update like this.